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Topic: OAUA & Hacking (Read 8386 times)

I thought it was about time I came out of hiding to provide an update or two on the OA Worldhack. I'm still here, and am tantalizingly close to finishing up work on The Tale of Twin Dragons Part II: Flight of Fury. In fact I'm in the playtesting phase right now and should have that finished up this weekend, and then there is only the closing segment to add to the end. It's taken me much longer than I anticipated, but I'm pleased with the end result.

Following that, I do plan to turn my attention to rolling back the CKIT hacks to previous versions between 1.2 and 1.3 until I can find and eliminate the game crashing bugs. I ran across another one when casting Enchanted Blade, and that spell is far too good to not be able to use. If anyone has found any other bugs than what I've listed below, please let me know so I can do my best to track those down as well.

I've begun researching the remaining bugs in the OA Worldhack, and in the early stages I've discovered that the Temple Freeze bug was present since OAUA 1.0. I was thinking it was a product of all the spell updates in OA 1.3, but it wasn't, which makes me think it is probably related to the CCH edits which have been there from the start.

The bug can be recreated by setting up a Temple event with maximum spell level 7 and no cost for healing. Then if you select Heal and receive "The Whole Party is Healed" message, OAUA will freeze, but I don't think any of the individual Temple spells cause the same problem. I'll keep looking into this one to see if I can isolate the routine that is causing the issue, but in the meantime I believe it can be successfully avoided by keeping at least a low cost associated with Temple healing, or perhaps removing the "Heal" option from the Temple event menu.

Just a quick update on the Temple Freeze bug -- in my tests, you can still offer Temple healing for free all the way up to maximum level, and no individual spell causes any problems. It's the Temple "Fix" that is the issue, and I was correct that the issue is related to the post-drain / pre-drain checks. I've tried some dabbling with CKIT, and have been successful in causing it to error out instead of freeze, so right now my best option for a permanent fix is to disable the "Fix" button in the Temple event.

In the meantime, you can still use Temple events, just be sure to select the healing spells individually during gameplay.

While playing through the excellent "The Tale of Twin Dragons - Chapter 1" again, using OAUA1.3 and the updated design version (and no UAShell), I came across a weird bug. I have no idea what could have caused it though.

In one of the combats near the end, I noticed the pre-made Wu-Jen apparantly had no weapon equipped, although I knew he had wielded a dagger before. So I went into his inventory and in the inventory the dagger was shown as equipped but not on the combat screen. When I unreadied the dagger in the inventory and tried to ready it again, it didn't work though. The Wu-Jen was not allowed to wield it anymore.

And what's even more strange are the innumerable weird items highlighted in blue that were shown in his inventory without me having picked them up (see screenshot below). This had nothing to do with unreadying the dagger, I noticed it as soon as I checked the Wu-Jen's inventory after noticing something was wrong with the equipped weapon.

When I started playing the Wu-Jen's inventory was fine and during the rest of the game I didn't look at it, so unfortunately I can't say when things started to go wrong... Have you seen anything like this before, any idea what could have caused it?

PS: TTOTD1 was fun even on this second playthrough and I loved how the master was addressing my female PC as "daughter" instead of "son". I know the carat hack was integrated in OAUA13 but I didn't know it also offered this possibility. Are there any more gender-specific words in it? Or is there a trick to use your own words?

Hi Olivier,Glad you enjoyed it the second time through! The "daughter" and "son" references actually utilize an event condition check (if Active PC is Gender) instead of the 'carat' hack in that one instance, because the carat hack only allows for pronouns. But between the 'carat' and the new event conditions, you can see there are lots of opportunities to personalize!

I have never seen that bug before, and that looks like a bad one, a corrupted cch file, perhaps. You were using the PCs that I included with the adventure, which are the same ones I used. I know there were some serious changes to the Wu Jen level / spell progression in v1.3, so perhaps it has something to do with that, but in my memory I had rebuilt each of the PCs in TD1 because of those changes so I'm surprised it would be causing such a problem. I'll have to try TD1 again to see if I can recreate it though. Ugh...

I found a way to split out the automatic updater utilities that Brian had created for the OAUA releases and convert them into DIFF files that I can examine and compare, but sorting out what is what is no easy task I'm afraid. The good news (I guess) is that most of the bugs reported in v1.3 were not bugs in v1.2 so there's hope if I can just isolate the faulty routines. Unfortunately it may mean sacrificing some of the new features. We'll see...

The "daughter" and "son" references actually utilize an event condition check (if Active PC is Gender) instead of the 'carat' hack in that one instance, because the carat hack only allows for pronouns. But between the 'carat' and the new event conditions, you can see there are lots of opportunities to personalize!

Ah, very clever. I like that.

Can I assume it's safe to continue TD2 by loading savegame A and using your pre-made party again, instead of transferring my corrupted character files?And another question, TD2 doesn't require UAShell either, right?

Can I assume it's safe to continue TD2 by loading savegame A and using your pre-made party again, instead of transferring my corrupted character files?And another question, TD2 doesn't require UAShell either, right?

Yes, definitely safe to continue TD2 by loading SaveGame A. Those are the PCs I completed TD1 with and used in at least a dozen complete playtests of TD2. I meant to ask you if you had tried reloading a Save Game in TD1, did it fix the problem with your Wu Jen?

TD2 does not require UAShell. In fact, if you are using UAShell, it is probably creating all kinds of problems with your OAUA installation.

I meant to ask you if you had tried reloading a Save Game in TD1, did it fix the problem with your Wu Jen?

No, I didn't try that. I only noticed the issues with the Wu Jen when I was nearly finished and I was able to complete the game anyway, so the thought of re-playing after loading Save Game A never entered my mind.

I gather from this thread that I need the installation without UAShell to run "Twin Dragons" I & II?

Not necessarily -- it just depends on how you installed UAShell. If you have an OAUA folder with a full install of FRUA and the OA Worldhack installed over that and *then* you installed UAShell, it should be fine. But if you have a folder with UAShell already installed and then installed the OA Worldhack on top of that, then UAShell will have a nasty habit of reverting lots of files into FRUA default settings.

I have UAShell installed in my OAUA directory and it's not causing me problems because I installed it after installing the OA Worldhack.

Yes, for playing hans' last design I did exactly that, install UAShell on top of OAUA, as explained in the OAUA installation instructions. But apparantly I haven't installed it in my most recent OAUA13 folder. So in either case, I guess UAShell can't be what was causing the issues...